RILM Music Encyclopedias


RILM Music Encyclopedias '' is an electronic collection of music reference works from 1775 to the present from Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale. RME expands every year by three to five titles.
RME was launched in December 2015 with 41 titles.
WWW rme.rilm.org

Scope and contents

The earliest RME piece, Jean Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique, was published in 1775. RME also contains the first edition of “The Grove”, in an edition published by Theodore Presser in 1895.
The largest number of titles date from 2000 onward. These include Ken Bloom's Broadway, Lol Henderson and Lee Stacey's Encyclopedia of Music in the 20th Century, Peter Matzke et al., Das Gothic- und Dark Wave-Lexikon, and Richard Kostelanetz's Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. The Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, conceived between 1972 and 2006, is also included.
RME also holds The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music and Eileen Southern's Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians.
RME expands annually with additions of four titles in average. One of the titles, Komponisten der Gegenwart, is being regularly updated with new articles or additions to existing articles.
Stephen Henry mentions RME's
“ability to provide access to some excellent European resources that might otherwise, not be available to libraries with less than comprehensive collections.”

Functionality

RME is accessible on EBSCOhost and RILM's platform Egret.
RME on Egret facilitates automatic translation of content to over 100 languages via Google Translate integration. Users can set up accounts where annotations and notes can be created, saved, and shared, cross references linking related content throughout RME, links to related content in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and other resources, as well as an interface compatible with mobile and tablet devices.
Librarian Laurie Sampsel asserts that
“cross searching the full text of so many titles yields results impossible to find using the print versions of these encyclopedia's.”

Title list

At Launch
2017 Additions
  • Československý hudební slovník osob a institucí
  • Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire
  • Editori Italiani
  • Opernlexikon by Stieger
2018 Additions
  • Enciclopédia da música brasileira
  • Il melodramma italiano 1861-1900; 1901-1926
  • Neues Historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonküstler
  • The 20th century violin concertante
2019 Additions
  • Diccionario biográfico – bibliográfico – histórico – crítico de guitarras y guitarristas
  • Musical instruments: A comprehensive dictionary
  • Real-Lexikon der Musikinstrumente, zugleich ein Polyglossar für das gesamte Instrumentengebiet
  • The stringed instruments of the Middle Ages: Their evolution and development
  • A survey of musical instruments
2020 Additions
2021 Additions